Utopia/Tech Roadmap

In man's eternal journey to a fuller understanding and control of the world around him certain new technologies have been developed and will be developed that vastly change almost every aspect of human life. To start we should cover those vital gifts of science which mankind already benefits from, the first foundation stone of all society is surely communication.

Early man soon set himself apart from the other animals and rose to the top of the food chain with the effective use of team-work. A team of maybe six pre-historic hunters armed with spears could confuse and overwhelm even the largest of prey by using only the most basic of communication and planning skills. In modern times communication has become an art form, indeed a plethora of art forms; oration, poetry, prose both fiction and factual even separating over time into such specialties as political, technical, short hand and a myriad of archaic almost forgotten variants. Communication could be said to be the first and still most important invention of humanity.

In the technologically advanced twentieth century communication developed a new front; the fast developing field of communicating with computers, new languages especially for this task were created. How ever it was not only computers that inspired new languages, short hand was developed to allow secretaries to take memos at great speed. Created using a simple system of easy to draw symbols for commonly used words it was a mild revolution in the office and foreshadowed the invention of the Dictaphone as a time saving tool for executives on the move. Like short hand the language ‘Lojban’ was invented to stream line language for better use in a specific purpose, while short hand increases speed Lojban increases accuracy and logic. The phrase ‘cute little girls school’ for instance has 22 connotations in English while in Lojban you could only say one precise meaning e.g. the school for girls who are both little and cute or the school which is little and cute and for girls.

In any kind of utopia good communication would be a vital thing; many attempts have been made to enforce an attempted utopian regime by controlling communications, Nazi Germany developed propaganda into an art form and made the use of it on both the enemy and the home state standard practice. George Orwell even theorized in ‘1984’ that language could be used in a more sinister way to subjugate the masses, he suggested that if someone could not say something then they wouldn’t be able to think that thing and so by removing certain phrases from the language thus any rebellion would be literally – unthinkable.